To Room Nineteen: Collected Stories Volume One

When the show was over, George went backstage to fetch Bobby. She was with ‘the other half of the act’, a rather good-looking boy of about twenty, who was being deferential to the impressive husband of Bobby. George said to her: ‘You were very good, dear, very good indeed.’ She looked smilingly at him, half-mocking, but he did not know what it was she was mocking now. And she had been good. But he never wanted to see it again.

The revue was a success and ran for some months before it was moved to a bigger theatre. George finished his production of Romeo and Juliet which, so the critics said, was the best London had seen for many years, and refused other offers of work. He did not need the money for the time being, and besides, he had not seen very much of Bobby lately.

But of course now she was working. She was at rehearsals several times a week, and away from the flat every evening. But George never went to her theatre. He did not want to see the sad, unresisting children twitching to the cruel music.

It seemed Bobby was happy. The various little parts she had played with him – the urchin, the cool hostess, the dear child – had all been absorbed into the hard-working female who cooked him his meals, looked after him, and went out to her theatre giving him a friendly kiss on the cheek. Their relationship was most pleasant and amiable. George lived beside this good friend, his wife Bobby, who was doing him so much credit in every way, and ached permanently with loneliness.

One day he was walking down the Charing Cross Road, looking into the windows of bookshops, when he saw Bobby strolling up the other side with Jackie, the other half of her act. She looked as he had never seen her: her dark face was alive with animation, and Jackie was looking into her face and laughing. George thought the boy very handsome. He had a warm gloss of youth on his hair and in his eyes; he had the lithe, quick look of a young animal.

He was not jealous at all. When Bobby came in at night, gay and vivacious, he knew he owed this to Jackie and did not mind. He was even grateful to him. The warmth Bobby had for ‘the other half of the act’ overflowed towards him; and for some months Myra and his wife were present in his mind, he saw and felt them, two loving presences, young women who loved George, brought into being by the feeling between Jackie and Bobby. Whatever that feeling was.

The Offbeat Revue ran for nearly a year, and then it was coming off, and Bobby and Jackie were working out another act. George did not know what it was. He thought Bobby needed a rest, but he did not like to say so. She had been tired recently, and when she came in at night there was strain beneath her gaiety. Once, at night, he woke to see her beside his bed. ‘Hold me for a little, George,’ she asked. He opened his arms and she came into them. He lay holding her, quite still. He had opened his arms to the sad waif, but it was an unhappy woman lying in his arms. He could feel the movement of her lashes on his shoulder, and the wetness of tears.

He had not lain beside her for a long time, years it seemed. She did not come to him again.

‘You don’t think you’re working too hard, dear?’ he asked once, looking at her strained face; but she said briskly, ‘No, I’ve got to have something to do, can’t stand doing nothing.’

One night it was raining hard, and Bobby had been feeling sick that day, and she did not come home at her usual time. George became worried and took a taxi to the theatre and asked the doorman if she was still there. It seemed she had left some time before. ‘She didn’t look too well to me, sir,’ volunteered the doorman, and George sat for a time in the taxi, trying not to worry. Then he gave the driver Jackie’s address; he meant to ask him if he knew where Bobby was. He sat limp in the back of the taxi, feeling the heaviness of his limbs, thinking of Bobby ill.

The place was in a mews, and he left the taxi and walked over rough cobbles to a door which had been the door of stables. He rang, and a young man he didn’t know let him in, saying yes, Jackie Dickson was in. George climbed narrow, steep, wooden stairs slowly, feeling the weight of his body, while his heart pounded. He stood at the top of the stairs to get his breath, in a dark which smelled of canvas and oil and turpentine. There was a streak of light under a door; he went towards it, knocked, heard no answer, and opened it. The scene was a high, bare, studio sort of place, badly lighted, full of pictures, frames, junk of various kinds. Jackie, the dark, glistening youth, was seated cross-legged before the fire, grinning as he lifted his face to say something to Bobby, who sat in a chair, looking down at him. She was wearing a formal dark dress and jewellery, and her arms and neck were bare and white. She looked beautiful, George thought, glancing once, briefly, at her face, and then away; for he could see on it an emotion he did not want to recognize. The scene held for a moment before they realized he was there and turned their heads with the same lithe movement of disturbed animals, to see him standing there in the doorway. Both faces froze. Bobby looked quickly at the young man, and it was in some kind of fear. Jackie looked sulky and angry.

‘I’ve come to look for you, dear,’ said George to his wife. ‘It was raining and the doorman said you seemed ill.’

‘It’s very sweet of you,’ she said and rose from the chair, giving her hand formally to Jackie, who nodded with bad grace at George.

The taxi stood in the dark, gleaming rain, and George and Bobby got into it and sat side by side, while it splashed off into the street.

‘Was that the wrong thing to do, dear?’ asked George, when she said nothing.

‘No,’ she said.

‘I really did think you might be ill.’

She laughed. ‘Perhaps I am.’

‘What’s the matter, my darling? What is it? He was angry, wasn’t he? Because I came?’

‘He thinks you’re jealous,’ she said shortly.

‘Well, perhaps I am rather,’ said George.

She did not speak.

‘I’m sorry, dear, I really am. I didn’t mean to spoil anything for you.’

‘Well, that’s certainly that,’ she remarked, and she sounded impersonally angry.

‘Why? But why should it be?’

‘He doesn’t like – having things asked of him,’ she said, and he remained silent while they drove home.

Up in the warmed, comfortable old flat, she stood before the fire, while he brought her a drink. She smoked fast and angrily, looking into the fire.

‘Please forgive me, dear,’ he said at last. ‘What is it? Do you love him? Do you want to leave me? If you do, of course you must. Young people should be together.’

She turned and stared at him, a black strange stare he knew well.

‘George,’ she said, ‘I’m nearly forty.’

‘But darling, you’re a child still. At least, to me.’

‘And he,’ she went on, ‘will be twenty-two next month. I’m old enough to be his mother.’ She laughed, painfully. ‘Very painful, maternal love … or so it seems … but then how should I know?’ She held out her bare arm and looked at it. Then, with the fingers of one hand she creased down the skin of that bare arm towards the wrist, so that the ageing skin lay in creases and folds. Then, setting down her glass, her cigarette held between tight, amused, angry lips, she wriggled her shoulders out of her dress, so that it slipped to her waist, and she looked down at her two small, limp, unused breasts. ‘Very painful, dear George,’ she said, and shrugged her dress up quickly, becoming again the formal woman dressed for the world. ‘He does not love me. He does not love me at all. Why should he?’ She began singing:

He does not love me

With a love that is trew …

Then she said in stage cockney, ‘Repeat; I could ‘ave bin ‘is muvver, see?’ And with the old rolling derisive black flash of her eyes she smiled at George.

George was thinking only that this girl, his darling, was suffering now what he had suffered, and he could not stand it. She had been going through this for how long now? But she had been working with that boy for nearly two years. She had been living beside him, George, and he had had no idea at all of her unhappiness. He went over to her, put his arms around her, and she stood with her head on his shoulder and wept. For the first time, George thought, they were together. They sat by the fire a long time that night, drinking, smoking and her head was on his knee and he stroked it, and thought that now, at last, she had been admitted into the world of emotion and they would learn to be really together. He could feel his strength stirring along his limbs for her. He was still a man, after all.

Next day she said she would not go on with the new show. She would tell Jackie he must get another partner. And besides, the new act wasn’t really any good. ‘I’ve had one little act all my life,’ she said, laughing. ‘And sometimes it’s fitted in, and sometimes it hasn’t.’

‘What was the new act? What’s it about?’ he asked her.

She did not look at him. ‘Oh, nothing very much. It was Jackie’s idea, really …’ Then she laughed. ‘It’s quite good really, I suppose …’

‘But what is it?’

‘Well, you see …’ Again he had the impression she did not want to look at him. ‘It’s a pair of lovers. We make fun … it’s hard to explain, without doing it.’

‘You make fun of love?’ he asked.

‘Well, you know, all the attitudes … the things people say. It’s a man and a woman – with music of course. All the music you’d expect, played offbeat. We wear the same costume as for the other act. And then we go through all the motions … It’s rather funny, really …’ she trailed off, breathless, seeing George’s face. ‘Well,’ she said, suddenly very savage, ‘if it isn’t all bloody funny, what is it?’ She turned away to take a cigarette.

‘Perhaps you’d like to go on with it after all?’ he asked ironically.

‘No. I can’t. I really can’t stand it. I can’t stand it any longer, George,’ she said, and from her voice he understood she had nothing to learn from him of pain.

He suggested they both needed a holiday, so they went to Italy. They travelled from place to place, never stopping anywhere longer than a day, for George knew she was running away from any place around which emotion could gather. At night he made love to her, but she closed her eyes and thought of the other half of the act; and George knew it and did not care. But what he was feeling was too powerful for his old body; he could feel a lifetime’s emotions beating through his limbs, making his brain throb.

Again they curtailed their holiday, to return to the comfortable old flat in London.

On the first morning after their return, she said: ‘George, you know you’re getting too old for this sort of thing – it’s not good for you; you look ghastly.’

‘But, darling, why? What else am I still alive for?’

‘People’ll say I’m killing you,’ she said, with a sharp, half angry, half amused, black glance.

‘But, my darling, believe me …’

He could see them both in the mirror; he, an old pursy man, head lowered in sullen obstinacy; she … but he could not read her face.

‘And perhaps I’m getting too old?’ she remarked suddenly.

For a few days she was gay, mocking, then suddenly tender. She was provocative, teasing him with her eyes; then she would deliberately yawn and say, ‘I’m going to sleep. Good night, George.’

‘Well, of course, my darling, if you’re tired.’

One morning she announced she was going to have a birthday party; it would be her fortieth birthday soon. The way she said it made George feel uneasy.

On the morning of her birthday she came into his study where he had been sleeping, carrying his breakfast tray. He raised himself on his elbow and gazed at her, appalled. For a moment he had imagined it must be another woman. She had put on a severe navy blue suit, cut like a man’s; heavy black-laced shoes; and she had taken the wisps of black hair back off her face and pinned them into a sort of clumsy knot. She was suddenly a middle-aged woman.

‘But, my darling,’ he said, ‘my darling, what have you done to yourself?’

‘I’m forty,’ she said. ‘Time to grow up.’

‘But, my darling, I do so love you in your clothes. I do so love you being beautiful in your lovely clothes.’

She laughed, and left the breakfast tray beside his bed, and went clumping out on her heavy shoes.

That morning she stood in the kitchen beside a very large cake, on which she was carefully placing forty small pink candles. But it seemed only the sister had been asked to the party, for that afternoon the three of them sat around the cake and looked at one another. George looked at Rosa, the sister, in her ugly straight, thick suit, and at his darling Bobby, all her grace and charm submerged into heavy tweed, her hair dragged back, without make-up. They were two middle-aged women, talking about food and buying.

George said nothing. His whole body throbbed with loss.

The dreadful Rosa was looking with her sharp eyes around the expensive flat, and then at George and then at her sister.

‘You’ve let yourself go, haven’t you, Bobby?’ she commented at last. She sounded pleased about it.

Bobby glanced defiantly at George. ‘I haven’t got time for all this nonsense any more,’ she said. ‘I simply haven’t got time. We’re all getting on now, aren’t we?’

George saw the two women looking at him. He thought they had the same black, hard, inquisitive stare over sharp-bladed noses. He could not speak. His tongue was thick. The blood was beating through his body. His heart seemed to be swelling and filling his whole body, an enormous soft growth of pain. He could not hear for the tolling of the blood through his ears. The blood was beating up into his eyes, but he shut them so as not to see the two women.

The Woman

The two elderly gentlemen emerged on to the hotel terrace at the same moment. They stopped, and checked movements that suggested they wished to retreat. Their first involuntary glances had been startled, even troubled. Now they allowed their eyes to exchange a long, formal glare of hate, before turning deliberately away from each other.

They surveyed the terrace. A problem! Only one of the tables still remained in sunlight. They stiffly marched towards it, pulled out chairs, seated themselves. At once they opened newspapers and lifted them up like screens.

A pretty waitress came sauntering across to take the orders. The two newspapers remained stationary. Around the edge of one Herr Scholtz ordered warmed wine; from the shelter of the other Captain Forster from England demanded tea – with milk.

When she returned with these fluids, neatly disposed on similar metal trays, both walls of print slightly lowered themselves. Captain Forster, with an aggressive flicker of uneasy blue eyes turned towards his opponent, suggested that it was a fine evening. Herr Scholtz remarked with warm freemasonry that it was a shame such a pretty girl should not be free to enjoy herself on such an evening. Herr Scholtz appeared to consider that he had triumphed, for his look towards the Englishman was boastful. To both remarks, however, Rosa responded with an amiable but equally perfunctory smile. She strolled away to the balustrade where she leaned indolently, her back to them.

Stirring sugar into tea, sipping wine, was difficult with those stiff papers in the way. First Herr Scholtz, then the Captain, folded his and placed it on the table. Avoiding each other’s eyes, they looked away towards the mountains, which, however, were partly blocked by Rosa.

She wore a white blouse, low on the shoulders; a black skirt, with a tiny white apron; smart red shoes. It was at her shoulders that the gentlemen gazed. They coughed, tapped on the table with their fingers, narrowed their eyes in sentimental appreciation at the mountains, looked at Rosa again. From time to time their eyes almost met but quickly slid away. Since they could not fight, civilization demanded they should speak. Yes, conversation appeared imminent.

A week earlier they had arrived on the same morning and were given rooms opposite each other at the end of a long corridor. The season was nearly over, the hotel half empty. Rosa therefore had plenty of time to devote to Herr Scholtz, who demanded it: he wanted bigger towels, different pillows, a glass of water. But soon the bell pealed from the other side of the corridor, and she excused herself and hastened over to Captain Forster who was also dissatisfied with the existing arrangements for his comfort. Before she had finished with him, Herr Scholtz’s bell rang again. Between the two of them Rosa was kept busy until the midday meal, and not once did she suggest by her manner that she had any other desire in this world than to readjust Captain Forster’s reading light or bring Herr Scholtz cigarettes and newspapers.

That afternoon Captain Forster happened to open his door; and he found he had a clear view into the room opposite, where Rosa stood at the window smiling, in what seemed to him charming surrender, at Herr Scholtz, who was reaching out a hand towards her elbow. The hand dropped. Herr Scholtz scowled, walked across, indignantly closed his door as if it were the Captain’s fault it had been left open … Almost at once the Captain’s painful jealousy was erased, for Rosa emerged from that door, smiling with perfect indifference, and wished him good day.

That night, very late, quick footsteps sounded on the floor of the corridor. The two doors gently opened at the same moment; and Rosa, midway between them, smiled placidly at first Herr Scholtz, then the Captain, who gave each other contemptuous looks after she had passed. They both slammed their doors.

Next day Herr Scholtz asked her if she would care to come with him up the funicular on her afternoon off, but unfortunately she was engaged. The day after Captain Forster made the same suggestion.

Finally, there was a repetition of that earlier incident. Rosa was passing along the corridor late at night on her way to her own bed, when those two doors cautiously opened and the two urgent faces appeared. This time she stopped, smiled politely, wished them a very good night. Then she yawned. It was a slight gesture, but perfectly timed. Both gentlemen solaced themselves with the thought that it must have been earned by his rival; for Herr Scholtz considered the Captain ridiculously gauche, while the Captain thought Herr Scholtz’s attitude towards Rosa disgustingly self-assured and complacent. They were therefore able to retire to their beds with philosophy.

Since then Herr Scholtz had been observed in conversation with a well-preserved widow of fifty who unfortunately was obliged to retire to her own room every evening at nine o’clock for reasons of health and was, therefore, unable to go dancing with him, as he longed to do. Captain Forster took his tea every afternoon in a café where there was a charming waitress who might have been Rosa’s sister.

The two gentlemen looked through each other in the dining room, and each crossed the street if he saw the other approaching. There was a look about them which suggested that they might be thinking Switzerland – at any rate, so late in the season – was not all that it had been.

Gallant, however, they both continued to be; and they might continually be observed observing the social scene of flirtations and failures and successes with the calm authority of those well qualified by long familiarity with it to assess and make judgments. Men of weight, they were; men of substance; men who expected deference.

And yet … here they were seated on opposite sides of that table in the last sunlight, the mountains rising above them, all mottled white and brown and green with melting spring, the warm sun folding delicious but uncertain arms around them – and surely they were entitled to feel aggrieved? Captain Forster – a lean, tall, military man, carefully suntanned, spruced, brushed – was handsome still, no doubt of it. And Herr Scholtz – large, rotund, genial, with infinite resources of experience – was certainly worth more than the teatime confidences of a widow of fifty?

Unjust to be sixty on such a spring evening; particularly hard with Rosa not ten paces away, shrugging her shoulders in a low-cut embroidered blouse.

And almost as if she were taking a pleasure in cruelty, she suddenly stopped humming and leaned forward over the balustrade. With what animation did she wave and call down the street, while a very handsome young man below waved and called back. Rosa watched him stride away, and then she sighed and turned, smiling dreamily.

There sat Herr Scholtz and Captain Forster gazing at her with hungry resentful appreciation.

Rosa narrowed her blue eyes with anger and her mouth went thin and cold, in disastrous contrast with her tenderness of a moment before. She shot bitter looks from one gentleman to the other, and then she yawned again. This time it was a large, contemptuous, prolonged yawn; and she tapped the back of her hand against her mouth for emphasis and let out her breath in a long descending note, which, however, was cut off short as if to say that she really had no time to waste even on this small demonstration. She then swung past them in a crackle of starched print, her heels tapping. She went inside.

The terrace was empty. Gay painted tables, striped chairs, flowery sun umbrellas – all were in cold shadow, save for the small corner where the gentlemen sat. At the same moment, from the same impulse, they rose and pushed the table forward into the last well of golden sunlight. And now they looked at each other straight and frankly laughed.

‘Will you have a drink?’ inquired Herr Scholtz in English, and his jolly smile was tightened by a consciously regretful stoicism. After a moment’s uncertainty, during which Captain Forster appeared to be thinking that the stoicism was too early an admission of defeat, he said, ‘Yes – yes. Thanks, I will.’

Herr Scholtz raised his voice sharply, and Rosa appeared from indoors, ready to be partly defensive. But now Herr Scholtz was no longer a suppliant. Master to servant, a man who habitually employed labour, he ordered wine without looking at her once. And Captain Forster was the picture of a silky gentleman.

When she reappeared with the wine they were so deep in good fellowship they might have been saying aloud how foolish it was to allow the sound companionship of men to be spoiled, even for a week, on account of the silly charm of women. They were roaring with laughter at some joke. Or rather, Herr Scholtz was roaring, a good stomach laugh from depths of lusty enjoyment. Captain Forster’s laugh was slightly nervous, emitted from the back of his throat, and suggested that Herr Scholtz’s warm Bavarian geniality was all very well, but that there were always reservations in any relationship.

It soon transpired that during the war – the First War, be it understood – they had been enemies on the same sector of the front at the same time. Herr Scholtz had been wounded in his arm. He bared it now, holding it forward under the Captain’s nose to show the long white scar. Who knew but that it was the Captain who had dealt that blow – indirectly, of course – thirty-five years before? Nor was this all. During the Second World War Captain Forster had very nearly been sent to North Africa, where he would certainly have had the pleasure of fighting Herr, then Oberst-leutnant, Scholtz. As it happened, the fortunes of war had sent him to India instead. While these happy coincidences were being established, it was with the greatest amity on both sides; and if the Captain’s laugh tended to follow Herr Scholtz’s just a moment late, it could easily be accounted for by those unavoidable differences of temperament. Before half an hour was out, Rosa was dispatched for a second flask of the deep crimson wine.

When she returned with it, she placed the glasses so, the flasks so, and was about to turn away when she glanced at the Captain and was arrested. The look on his face certainly invited comment. Herr Scholtz was just remarking, with that familiar smiling geniality, how much he regretted that the ‘accidents of history’ – a phrase that caused the Captain’s face to tighten very slightly – had made it necessary for them to be enemies in the past. In the future, he hoped, they would fight side by side, comrades in arms against the only possible foe for either … But now Herr Scholtz stopped, glanced swiftly at the Captain, and after the briefest possible pause, and without a change of tone, went on to say that as for himself he was a man of peace, a man of creation: he caused innumerable tubes of toothpaste to reach the bathrooms of his country, and he demanded nothing more of life than to be allowed to continue to do so. Besides, had he not dropped his war title, the Oberst-leutnant, in proof of his fundamentally civilian character?